I evaluate the storage usage on my primary Mac Mini occasionally, always to be surprised by some storage bomb that is consuming far more than expected. Today’s lucky winner is Windows App — this is the RDC client I use to connect to my primary Windows CUDA machine — which was consuming almost 200GB in the user Caches folder, accumulated junk going back about a year.
How does a simple VNC app amass such a volume of junk files? Very good question. Each time I do this exercise I find some culprit that subscribes to the add forever but never manage or delete philosophy of file management. And note that the Caches folder isn’t some system service where things are truncated as needed, but instead it’s up to the apps using this facility to delete their junk as they go, which lots of apps never do. Add that on modern flash storage you shouldn’t treat it like RAM where “empty space is wasted space”. For a variety of reasons you should strive to have 20%+ of an SSD unused, yielding the benefits of pSLC/dynamic caching. Lower usage/TRIMming makes wear-levelling more capable as well.
This entry reminded me why I’ve always leveraged external storage on my Macs.